... see where I wrote on the first day of class BEWARE: LINGUISTICS IS STRAIGHT UP DESCRIPTIVISM and circled it several times.But then the unthinkable happened: I fell passionately in love with linguistic descriptivism, and I realized that, from a strictly historical standpoint, language did just fine for a few thousand years before the advent of Prescriptivism a ...

... double-booked, and ended up bringing everyone together for cocktails at Bierex followed by port and whisky and tea at my flat until the early hours, while the guys had a heated discussion about prescriptivism vs. descriptivism in linguistics and I felt a bit like a salonniere. Good times.The calendar?s filling up over the next couple of weeks as well, but not so much as to be overwhelming. It?s ...

I never met David Foster Wallace, and he was much cooler and more successful than I'll ever be, but I always felt a certain kinship. He was almost exactly my age (two months younger), and we shared a love for tennis as well as a passion for language. A couple of links:A clip about a usage peeve from an interview with Bryan Garner.An essay about descriptivism vs. prescriptivism.

... ). Laclau's preface to žižek's Sublime Object offers a description of how the author's anti-descriptivism differs from the standard anti-descriptivism found in the 'nominalistic ... , žižek presents the following argument: 'What is overlooked, at least in the standard version of anti-descriptivism is that this guaranteeing the identity of an object in all counterfactual situations, that is, through a ...